E-mails are steadily becoming a mainstream mode of communication, between friends, family and especially work colleagues. With this increasing reliance on e-mails, it is important to remain constantly up-to-date with e-mails/online alerts. Today, users of devices such as Blackberry® and Palm Treo® can get e-mail continuously on their devices through a technique called “push e-mail.” However, push e-mail, currently, does not work on notebook computers and many other mobile devices because it requires a specialized always-on wireless communication sub-system. To stay up-to-date, users of notebooks and other web-enabled mobile devices have to manually establish connection with their application servers (web and/or enterprise) and download e-mails, weather, news and entertainment items one by one. Unlike push e-mail, where the servers push content to the user's mobile devices, users of notebook PC have to pull information off the respective servers.
Conventionally, a corporate executive is required to pick-up his/her laptop, establish a connection to the Internet, take care of security/passwords, etc., and then synchronize information one by one. Unless he/she does all of this, he/she is unaware of any important e-mails/critical updates, such as flights delays, meeting changes, etc. Also, when he/she tries to do this, he/she needs to have Internet connectivity at his/her current location.
Keeping a laptop constantly powered on and connected wirelessly is not feasible because of power limitations of today's devices. A typical laptop's battery lasts about five hours. However, almost all mobile devices today are capable of entering a lower power “Sleep/Standby/Hibernate” state to conserve battery power when not in active use. To conserve battery power, an individual either would places his/her mobile device in the “Standby/Hibernate” state, or the device itself, if left idle, enters the state. Unfortunately, during such low power states, the device powers down much of the resources of the computer system, generally resulting in the loss of network connections. As a result, data on the mobile device does not remain synchronized with subsequently receive data by a network server.